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What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

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Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#51

Post by Alex3917 »

mquander wrote: post #19

I remember clearly in elementary school when I suddenly understood that gravity is just a constant acceleration; if I were in a box in space accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, it would feel exactly the same. For some reason, I found that absolutely mindblowing at the time. I spent all day trying to explain it to everyone else, and I don't think I've ever been so excited about knowing something again.

Do you also find it weird to think about how without gravity we couldn't walk? That one gets me especially hard because it's a such a tangible example of how we've evolved to take advantage of laws of the laws of physics, and how if these laws were even slightly different then we wouldn't be here, or at least not the same as we're here now.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#52

Post by derrida »

derrida wrote: post #48

2nd Law of Thermodynamics... Things flow from hot to cold, from simplicity to complexity. It is the only asymmetrical physical law! Does it have anything to do with time? We don't know!

Oh, I must say, someone mentioned Godels Incompleteness Theorem, and this comes pretty close. But I think the 2nd law if you think about it, can explain so much.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#54

Post by derrida »

fletchowns wrote: post #11

Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist, in some form or another. Whoa! Another one: Assuming peak efficiency, the turbines in the Grand Coulee Dam generates 1 gram of heat and light every 3.7 hours. All that water for one measly gram of something! Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence

"Everything that makes up my physical body has existed and always will exist, in some form or another." The physicist richard feynman in the first lecture of "the feynman lectures on physics" says that the most important fact, that would convey the most information would be the atom hypothesis or fact. Which is essentially what you said except with the additional bit of information that "... all matter is made of indivisible particles that both repel and attract each other depending on the distance between them"

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#55

Post by Alex3917 »

danielrm26 wrote: post #49

Over half of people in the U.S. don't believe in evolution.

It depends how you define "don't believe". They might say they don't believe in evolution, but that doesn't mean they act in ways that are logically congruent with evolution being false.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#59

Post by TGJ »

Alex3917 wrote: post #51
mquander wrote: post #19

I remember clearly in elementary school when I suddenly understood that gravity is just a constant acceleration; if I were in a box in space accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2, it would feel exactly the same. For some reason, I found that absolutely mindblowing at the time. I spent all day trying to explain it to everyone else, and I don't think I've ever been so excited about knowing something again.

Do you also find it weird to think about how without gravity we couldn't walk? That one gets me especially hard because it's a such a tangible example of how we've evolved to take advantage of laws of the laws of physics, and how if these laws were even slightly different then we wouldn't be here, or at least not the same as we're here now.

The first day of a robotics class, my teacher explained that we don't really walk. Each step is graceful falling. Place one foot forward, tilt and fall till the foot hits and repeat.

Re: What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?

#60

Post by sliverstorm »

Avshalom wrote: post #10
btilly wrote: post #6

My favorite isn't there. Back in the 1920s Hubble did photographic surveys of the sky with long exposures. Here is what he found. Pick a random spot in the sky. Take a long exposure. Count the stars you can see. Take a magnifying glass. Count the galaxies you can find. With a few obvious exceptions, there will be more galaxies than stars. A lot more. (Obvious exceptions would include things like nebulae that you can'…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_ultra_deep_field_hi... Every light there is a galaxy (okay Like and 7 stars). I remember seeing that photo when it came out and sort of brushing it off because it wasn't some sweeping nebula. Four years of an astrophysics degree later it nearly brought me to tears just thinking about looking at 10000 galaxies and the full weight of that sight. It's one of those things thats mo…

This one actually gives a bit of a 3rd dimension to space you don't see normally. That's really cool. Man, it looks like a mess out there.
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